The public dissolution of Iggy Azalea’s engagement to Nick Young exploded in sad and salacious fashion Thursday when the “Fancy” rapper took to social media to explain why she kicked her Los Angeles Laker fiancé to the curb last week.
“I broke up with Nick because I found out he had brought other women into our home while I was away and caught them on the security footage,” she tweeted early Thursday morning to her 6.62 million followers.
“This is like a second shot to the chest,” she later added. “And I feel like I don’t even know who the hell it is I’ve been loving all this time. People in this world really are fucked up.”
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The soul-baring triggered yet another landslide of sympathy and, of course, an inevitable smattering of shade from folks who haven’t forgiven her spotty record of casual racism and culture-stealing.
It’s hard enough to live, love, and lose in the age of social media. Imagine getting engaged, being cheated on, and breaking off your high-profile engagement while the world watched and snickered along, racing to see who can type out their best schadenfreude-laden tweets first?
Azalea’s tweet came one news cycle after Life & Style breathlessly reported that Young, 31, had cheated on her with his ex, Keonna Green, with whom he has a 4-year-old son. According to the gossip rag, Green is now four months pregnant with her second child with Young—a revelation Azalea learned at the same time as everyone else. “I have never even been told by Nick that his baby mother is pregnant so if this is true I’m finding out via E News,” she tweeted.
It’s all come as a fittingly viral end to the celebrity coupling of Azalea, 26, and Young, 31, a three-year relationship that saw social media, entertainment news, and gossip rags cover their every blissful move—and break out the popcorn when Lakers star D’Angelo Russell leaked video of teammate Young confessing to cheating on his bride-to-be in March.
The video not only reportedly caused a rift in the struggling Lakers’ locker room that became the talk of sports pundits, but also brought the heat and scrutiny of the mainstream pop media pressing down on the soon-to-be marrieds who scrambled to respond to the private embarrassment in the most public ways imaginable.
Azalea, for her part, put a brave face on. Appearing on Ellen shortly thereafter in April, she insisted that she and Young were all good.
Last week, when she finally broke up with him, she made it Instagram official in a now-deleted post.
“Unfortunately although I love Nick and have tried and tried to rebuild my trust in him—It’s become apparent in the last few weeks I am unable to,” Azalea wrote, wishing her ex good vibes. “I genuinely wish Nick the best. It’s never easy to part ways with the person you planned your entire future with, but futures can be rewritten and as of today mine is a blank page.”
Young, meanwhile, acknowledged the split with a solitary word that got retweeted 36,000 times: “Single.”
Relatively speaking, most relationships die pretty quietly between plebeians; some famous persons even manage to consciously uncouple without turning the whys and hows of it into matters of public concern. Maybe it hasn’t occurred to Azalea and Young, who have a combined 18 million followers (Twitter + IG) between them, that they don’t have to pull back the curtain to such a massive audience on a breakup that’s currently eclipsing their professional reputations in their respective fields.
Or, maybe, to each celeb their own. The gleeful Iggy/Swaggy P-watch continued last week as Azalea moved out of the house she and Young had shared, while both felt compelled to keep commenting on their split on social channels. When paparazzi caught a 1962 Chevy Impala being towed from the house, headlines reported that Azalea was dumping her ex’s car. She cleared up the confusion in a tweet.
“I never had anyone’s car towed nor did I kick Nick out of ‘my’ house,” she wrote. “The home belongs to Nick, I am the one moving. Thanks.”
Young didn’t bother setting the record straight, but joked about the misreported towing on Instagram and Twitter with the hashtag #SheBrokeMyShitDownInFrontTMZ and flew to Paris, posting emo videos singing along to Drake’s “Redemption.”
Until Azalea revealed she’d finally found video evidence of Young’s infidelity, even she seemed to be searching for answers in media appearances and interviews. Speaking with Billboard in April, she explained why she thanked Russell for exposing Young even as she stuck with him—and questioned, rightly so, where the public scrutiny was for her fiancé.
“Everybody just wanted to talk about how bad D’Angelo Russell was for leaking the video, breaking the bro code and I was like [to Nick], ‘Why do you get to escape responsibility for what you said?’ The thing that annoyed me the most about it was I felt like, oh OK, this is what’s happening in, like, society. The bigger story here is a guy breaking the guy code. Shouldn’t the bigger story be hey, this guy got down on one knee, made a verbal commitment to be committed to this woman and said that he didn’t? Why is [he] not the bad guy? The bad guy is D’Angelo for breaking some unsaid bro code. I hated that.”
Asked point blank if she’d been cheated on, Azalea told Billboard then that she had no idea.
“I don’t know. I’ll never know. He says he didn’t but I don’t know. Do I believe him? I don’t know about that. I don’t have any girl that’s out there like, ‘Yes I did. Here’s a video. Here’s the hotel key. Here’s where he stays. Here’s what he’s got tattooed on his left nut sack.’ I don’t have any kind of undeniable hard evidence,” she said, saying that cheating was “out of his character.”
Unlike pop music’s other recent single lady Taylor Swift (who, some might argue, instantly upgraded to a paparazzi-ready Tom Hiddleston the moment she ditched Calvin Harris), Azalea doesn’t have a knack for tapping into her own bad breakups to inspire her next hit records. Maybe she should try taking a cue from TayTay as she figures out how to move on, both publicly and privately.
“I find it baffling anyone would make the choice to bring a child into the world under these circumstances + want attention and $ for it,” Azalea tweeted later Thursday afternoon, taking to social media to keep exorcising the heartbreak. “I feel like my body was just drop kicked out of a plane with no parachute.”
